


West - Entanglements

by shaenie



Series: West [3]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-02
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:48:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie





	1. Wounded Things: Cate, Yuma, 1876

Most of the girls and too many of the customers have gathered in the hallway, and Cate has to shoulder her way among them, the bulky bustle and train of her evening gown forcing them to step aside as she passes. 

“What’s - ”

She halts a couple of steps inside the room, trying to understand what she’s looking at. Her first thought is that someone has dumped the freshly butchered carcass of an animal on the floor of her fifth-best bedroom. Blood, still vivid with life, is soaking steadily into the rug in widening patches, and the tangy iron stench of it fills Cate’s mouth.

Then she understands that the skin visible beneath the red streaks and among the purple-black patches is smooth and tanned and  _human_ . 

“Oh Jesus.”

Myra, who’s clutching her wrapper around her naked body and heaving her shoulders dryly, cringes even further into Liv’s embrace. Cate flashes Liv a look of sharp enquiry, but Liv shakes her head reassuringly.

“She’s fine, just scared. He hid her.”

Cate takes a deep breath – Christ, the  _smell_ – and lifts the hem of her gown, though it’s pointless to try to save it since her train sweeps the floor for a yard behind her. Gingerly she steps closer and then, steeling herself, she sinks to her knees in a billow of skirts beside him. 

He’s young, that much she sees. His body, where it isn’t a slaughter-house mess, is sleek with muscle and as hairless as a girl’s. One eye is darkly swollen shut, the lashes sticky with blood and tears. The other is open, and at first glance the pupil seems dilated to complete blackness. 

Cate puts her hand to the side of his throat. His pulse is hardly more than an insect-wing brush beneath her fingertips, but it’s there.

“Oh dear God, he’s still alive,” she breathes. 

She stands. The front of her skirt is soaked purple where her knees have pressed the vivid blue silk into his blood.

“He needs a doctor,” she says, unconsciously wiping her fingers across her bodice. 

No one moves. Cate’s staring down at the split and swollen ruin of his face. It’s impossible to say if he was handsome or homely, if he had the round cheeks of a Dutch farm boy or the hawk profile of an Irish gun-hand before this happened to him. Cate remembers – more than remembers,  _relives_ \- what it is not to recognize your own face, but only the sibling resemblance of all bruised and bloodied features. 

“I said, get Doctor Jackson,” Cate snaps, and after a second’s blank shock someone detaches from the group crowded in the doorway and pounds down the stairs. “Jewel, take Myra upstairs and look after her. Liv, you’re in charge downstairs. The rest of you, back to work. Gentlemen, I’m sorry for this inconvenience, but it’ll be taken care of.”

She sweeps toward the door, driving Liv and Myra before her, and the onlookers are forced to give way and begin to disperse as the two girls step out into the hallway. Liv darts Cate a look, but Cate stonily closes the door between them. 

Cate turns back and crosses the room again. She sits down on the edge of the bed to wait, and doesn’t even try to look away from the naked, broken thing lying at her feet.

Cut.

Cate stands at Samuel’s shoulder as he kneels on the rug, heedless of the blood soaking into his wool pants. His big dark hands move with gentle skill over the boy’s battered limbs and torso. 

“A preacher’d be more use to him than a doctor, Catie,” he says grimly. “He doesn’t have a chance. That arm’s broken of course, though it hasn’t come through the skin, so if that was all he mightn’t do so badly. But there’s a couple or three ribs busted on this side, and they’ve cut up something inside I’d say, from the way he’s bringing up blood. A broken nose bleeds plenty by itself, but not like this.”

Cate’s stockinged toes are slick inside her satin evening shoes. She knows what’s making them wet, but she refuses to look down and actually see the red stain spreading over her insteps. 

“Well, let me tie up his arm and his side, and we can get him onto the bed,” Samuel says.

“What? Not this bed. He’s not dying in  _my_ house!”

As well as replacing the broken chair, she’ll have to get rid of the bed and make a big show of buying a new one. And even if she changes every stick of furniture and the drapes, there’ll be plenty of customers who still won’t want to use a room where some poor kid was done to death in mid-tumble. 

“He’s not going anywhere else,” Samuel counters. “He can’t be moved; one jostle and those ribs are going to go through lung and maybe heart too. You insist on moving him and you might just as well stick a knife in him and have done with it.”

“What difference does it make? You just said he was going to die anyway.” 

“Now I  _know_ you don’t really mean that.”

“Oh, God,” Cate says in frustration. “Well, can we at least move him upstairs? I can’t afford to have a working room out of commission. As it is, the rug’s destroyed.”

“You’re a gracious lady, Catie. I’m sure heaven will compensate you richly.”

“Heaven wouldn’t give me a boot button if I was starving.” 

Cut.

Faint dawn’s staining the eastern sky by the time they have him settled as well as they can in Cate’s own bed. The worst of the blood has been wiped away and his wounds staunched with cotton. His arm has been bound to his side to stop him trying to move it, but Samuel hasn’t bothered to inflict the pain of splinting the bone. There’s no point, since the boy won’t live long enough for it to set. As it is, Cate’s fairly sure she will never forget his scream of agony as he was lifted with great care from the floor by four of Cate’s burliest and soberest customers. 

Cate’s not sure if he’s conscious. The one eye that can remains open, but doesn’t track when Cate passes her hand in front of his face. In the better light of three lamps, she can see that the pupil is not in fact completely dilated; there’s a band of deep brown iris surrounding it.

“Guess it won’t be long now,” Myra says, coming to stand at the foot of the bed as Cate leans in to towel away the newest well of bright blood from between his swollen and misshapen lips. 

“I hope not,” Cate says wearily. And then, glancing guiltily at Myra, “for his sake, I mean.”

Myra nods understandingly.

“Are those his things?” Cate asks, tipping her chin to indicate the clothes and boots Myra’s holding in her arms. 

“Uh huh, an’ his packs are there,” Myra says, turning her head to where a pair of tan leather saddle bags sit on the floor of the adjoining sitting room.

Cate uses her clean hand to rifle quickly through the hanging edges of the garments. His clothes are good, trail-dusty but well-made and quite elegant, and there’s a double-holstered knife belt of supple leather.

“Where’s his gun belt?”

“He didn’t have none.”

Cate arches her eyebrows in surprise. 

“Well, put them over there. I expect we can dress him up again after - ” 

Cate stops abruptly. 

“Who is he? Do we know him?” she asks.

Myra, dropping her bundle onto the couch, shakes her head. 

“I sure never saw him before,” she says, returning to Cate’s side. “I wouldn’t forget if I did, neither. He’s – he  _was_ \- real good-looking. Sweet too. Clean. He talked a lot of nonsense love talk to me, in French. And when he spoke English, he had this real fancy accent.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“Julien. Julien La Fleur. Ain’t that pretty? He said it meant ‘flower’,” Myra says, her voice breaking a little on the last word.

“Go to bed,” Cate says gently. “There’s no point in both of us waiting.”

Myra nods, sniffling. 

“You want me to unbutton you?”

Cate hesitates, casting a glance at her patient.

“He ain’t gonna see nothing,” Myra says. “And if I don’t, you’re gonna hafta stay in that rig ‘til someone else is here to help.”

Cate’s ribs are already aching from spending ten consecutive hours in a particularly cruel evening corset. She smiles wanly and moves away from the bed before turning her back to Myra. Myra works deftly down the row of little buttons. Cate pulls the short sleeves of the gown down her arms and peels the bodice off. Between them they untie the cords holding up Cate’s petticoats and bustle. Myra offers a steadying hand as Cate high-steps out of the slowly collapsing souffle of silk and cotton and canvas. Cate’s shoes are dyed rust brown almost to their upper edges. The knees of her drawers and the skirt of her chemise are stained and stiff with dried blood too. Cate digs her hands into her elaborate hair arrangement, plucking out pins and silk roses so that her blond hair comes falling down her back. 

“Thanks, I can manage from here,” she says, tossing her hair ornaments into the china dish on the bureau. “You run on.”

“Goodnight, Miss Cate. I mean, good morning.”

“Goodnight, Myra.”

The door closes softly behind Myra. Cate goes to peer at Julien again. He shifts a little, and the side of his mouth that isn’t swollen immobile flinches into a grimace of pain. The sound of his breathing changes, the soft liquid bubble giving way to a dry rattle. 

“Julien, try not to move,” Cate says, drawing nearer. 

He gasps, once and then again more sharply at the pain of the first gasp. The hand of his unbound arm claws into the quilt.

Cate circles the bed and reaches for the small dark-glass bottle Samuel left on the night table. 

“Bills,” the boy blurts through red-slicked lips. “No – ”

“It’s alright,” Cate says, unstoppering the bottle and transferring a dozen drops to the waiting shot glass. “You’re safe now.”

_Christ_ . She hasn’t even considered the possibility that he might not be, that the man who did this to him might come back to finish the job. Cate glances in the direction of her abandoned gown with its voluminous skirts, which are more than adequate to conceal the canvas housewife she wears when she’s downstairs. It’s full of useful things – two straight pins and a Smith  & Wesson Schofield revolver with five rounds loaded. 

He sobs in a breath and then groans in pain. Cate splashes a little water from the carafe into the glass. 

“No - ” he pants, and his voice is misshapen because of his injured mouth and nose. “Not Orlando – I’m Lando. My name is  _Lando_ .”

Even through the blurring of the blood welling out of his mouth, she can tell that he’s speaking English with the plain certainty of a native. Shit. The only thing she needs less than a boy bleeding to death in her bed is a boy who’s lied about who and what he is. God only knows what he did to earn this beating; God only knows who he’s pissed off. 

“What else? Lando what?” 

At least she can send word to his people, let them know that he –

“Don’t - ” he says, trying to cringe back into the pillows and the effort makes him arch in pain and that makes him cry out in agony. 

Cate leans across him, trying to still him with her arm outstretched across his chest. 

“Julien -  _Lando_ , it’s all right.” 

He stills for a second, but then the pain has him again and he writhes, his mouth gaping in agony and the blood welling over his lower teeth and onto his chin. 

“Oh God,” Cate winces. 

She puts the rim of the glass to his swollen lips.

“Lando, drink this, it’s for the pain.”

She tips the glass, and he coughs but manages to swallow and then heaves up enough blood to soak the sheet across his chest. Cate sets the glass aside and sits down by him on bed. 

“ _Lando_ ,” he insists, but she can already see the tension melting out of his limbs as the laudanum kicks in. 

“I know,” Cate says shakily, wiping the blood sticky curls back from his forehead. “Lando.”

He slips away into unconsciousness. Cate closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them because she can’t bear the burn of her eyelids against her eyes. Twelve drops of Samuel’s tincture is enough to fell a man for six hours straight. He won’t live that long. He won’t wake.

Cate presses the back of her hand to her nose and blinks hard, then gets up and moves a chair to the side of the bed. Then she goes to the pile of her clothes and tugs the revolver free and brings it back with her. She sits down and takes hold of his wrist, setting her fingertips into the valley between bone and tendon. The tick of the clock on the mantle marks a strong and even counterpoint to the thready and irregular flicker of his pulse beneath her touch. 

After an hour, Cate’s corset is a hoop of pure fire around her ribs. Lando’s pulse is still stuttering under her fingers, so she leaves him for just the moment it takes to shed her corset and shoes and stockings. When she comes back, she moves her chair in as close to the bed as she can, and pillows her head on one arm next to his hip, his wrist clasped in her other hand. 

Cate begins to drift. Her eyes slide closed and her breath softens. Her grip on Lando loosens.

The lack of vibration under her fingers startles her awake and she sits up with a gasp, pushing the stream of her loose hair out of her face. She fumbles for his arm again. 

The tiny beat of his pulse labors on. Cate sits upright again, her head dropping up and back with the weight of her skull pulling against the exhausted muscles of her neck. 

Sleep twists around her, a slip slide into vertigo and darkness. She jerks awake again, rubbing her free hand over her face and gaping her mouth until her jaw pops dully. Her spine is aching, her shoulders and arms too. It’s full day outside, the streets as busy as they’ll get, but she’s shaking with a sick chill she associates with the deepest hours of the night. God, she wishes he’d just die so she could go and lie down on the couch. 

“I didn’t mean that,” she whispers, squeezing his wrist a little in apology for the thought. 

The empty stretch of bed on his far side beckons alluringly. Cate can almost feel the cool softness of the quilt against her overly sensitive skin. She shudders, imagining herself waking up beside his cold corpse. She shakes herself, but spangles of darkness still crowd around the edges of her vision. After a few minutes, her head tips forward, and her hair slides around her bare shoulders and down her arms.

Cate dreams that Liv’s stabbed Lando and buried him under the porch so Cate doesn’t have to watch him any more and she can just sleep. 

“Oh Christ,” Cate says, coming awake in a sickening rush. 

She stands up shakily and makes her way around to the other side of the bed and climbs up onto the mattress beside him. She’ll risk waking next to a corpse if it just means she gets to  _rest_ for a moment. She half-sits half-reclines against the pillows, curled on her side to face him, one hand set on his chest to feel the faint vibration of his heart. 

When the afternoon sun comes round the corner of the house and fills the bedroom with thick gold splendor, Cate half wakes and still feels the thin quick beat under her palm. It’s only when the light falls full in her face that she comes completely to her senses. 

He’s burning, and the pulse under her hand is fever-fast and thinner than ever. Cate sits up and then slips off the bed. Her chemise is stuck to her skin with his sweat, and the sheets are drenched. He’s breathing in hoarse rasps through lips that have blackened with blood and bruises. 

Cate circles the bed and leans over him. 

“Oh Lando. You couldn’t just die easy, could you?” she chides him. “You have to do it the hard way.”


	2. Aftermath: Lando, Yuma, 1876

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=orlando-bloom-dog19.jpg)

 

When you're dying, he discovers, your entire life does not pass before your eyes.

Instead certain bits of it -- vivid and brightly etched images -- simply linger there, slow moving moments that he doesn't remember keeping with his waking mind. There is his mother in her lightest summer dress, fine spun linen of pale, pale blue, and the sun is in her hair, outlining dark tresses with fire, and he is seeing her from below as she smiles and laughs down at him. By the time he understands that it's perhaps his oldest memory, that he is so far below her because he is only a child, the vision of her is fading, failing, rippling like heat waves over the dusty surface of a long, pale road.

He keeps his eyes open. When they are closed, he sees only darkness. He remembers well enough why, and though he doesn't doubt that he's dying, he doesn't feel anything. He remembers flashes of pain and at least one moment of agony so raw that he hadn't been able to stave off total darkness, but mostly he's drifting in these odd moments of recollection, not his whole life, but tiny, intense glimpses of it that ache as much as soothe.

For a time there is his father, a tall man in a dusty shirt, and the faint vibration of his deep voice rumbling through Lando's shoulder. There is a book in one hand and the other is in Lando's hair, stroking it back from his face. There is a fire somewhere close, and the shadows hover on his beloved face, and his father shows no sign of the wasting that will eventually kill him, no sallow skin or sunken cheeks; he is strong and handsome and vital.

Lando doesn't doubt the authenticity of this moment, this sliver of time; it feels old and comfortable and familiar. Yet he has never thought of it that he remembers, and it's strange to relive it and know it like this, know it's real at the same time that it feels new and precious, an unexpected blessing, gratefully received.

Sometimes there are voices that he thinks might be real, but he doesn't listen to them. When he can hear voices, he can almost feel pain, and while he is not a coward, it seems pointless to suffer the pain if he doesn't have to.

Every moment is instantaneous and endless, and he's been watching the gentle flex and curve of Billy's back forever before he recognizes it, another moment that was never a memory. Billy is stripped to the waist with his back is to Lando, and Lando thinks he sees faint, pale lines high up on his shoulders, but that might not be real. He doesn't remember them. He forgets when Billy turns toward him, and there is a faint smile curling the line of his mouth, something that is equal parts mocking and fond and amused.

And that was the last time, Lando thinks, the thought feeling remarkably present, even in the drifting, painless place in which he's dwelling. The last smile, before...

The abrupt resurgence of pain leaves him gasping and feeling helpless, betrayed. He is done now, isn't he? Shouldn't this be done now?

Billy moves, the familiar quick and economical grace, and Lando is still drifting, cannot move back, and cannot escape. "Bills," he says, and the pain is suddenly an entity all its own, a horrid, greedy monster perched upon his chest, crushing him, grinding and grating inside him, and he can hardly breathe it is so monstrous. "No--" he tries, but he can't move and he can't breathe, and he knows Billy is not here to save him. Not this time.

He closes his eyes (the darkness would be better, now, anything would be better), but he can hear Bills moving still, the harsh, cool whisper -- "Orlando." -- and, "No--" but he is choking, struggling for breath through something thick and warm in his throat. Not Orlando, he would scream, if he weren't drowning, I'm Lando, my name is Lando.

He isn't afraid of the dark, hasn't been since he was a lad, but in the dark he can only hear Bills moving, can't see him, and his heart is pounding so hard, so bloody hard, it feels almost like it's stuttering, skipping beats, barely tripping along, and his eyes open again, but there is only light now, no Bills, just bright and merciless light that cheats his eyes as surely as darkness would, renders them useless; but he can feel the hands on him still, and he tries to bark out, manages, "Don't--" before his voice leaves him in another choking rush of warmth, this one quickly followed by something else, something cooler and bitter, vile, but better than the choking, and he's aware enough to understand that there must be something else, someone, there must be someone, but that's all the reasoning he is capable of, and this time when he closes his eyes it is silent in the darkness.

The next moment of brightness is a dream, he thinks, not like the forgotten moments from before. He is hot and sticky; he smells blood on the air so strongly that his gut rolls and protests feebly, and there is a girl in bed with him (but there can't be, he'd hidden her, he'd done that much before...). He looks at her for some time, but no amount of time or staring brings recognition. He sees blood on her hands, dried to a cracked brownish glaze, and there are stains on her chemise, on the curve of one rounded knee he can see beneath the hem of the chemise, oddly symmetrical because of the weave of the stocking.

"Find my mother," he tries to say, but though he can feel his lips (they are dry and feel wrong) trying to cooperate, not even a whisper of noise comes from them. Her eyelids flutter and flicker for a moment, as though in response to his voiceless plea, but his vision is fading even as her eyes open and her hand flutters upward to her face. I know her face, he thinks, but recent memory is jumbled and impossible to grasp, and he's still trying to think of her name when he succumbs, again, to darkness.


	3. Firewalk: Lando, Cate, Yuma, 1876

  
In the days that follow, Lando doesn’t die but he does go to hell.

A fever burns through him, dry and fierce as a brushfire. Cate spends hour after hour wetting down what unbroken skin he has to cool him, but the moisture parches off his flesh so quickly it’s like pouring water into sand. When Cate’s forced by exhaustion to let someone else tend him for a few hours, she takes care to ease him into sleep with a few drops of Samuel’s brew first. Cate’s already decided that for everyone’s safety the travailing body on her bed should remain ‘Julien’, but his insistence on ‘Lando’ rather than ‘Orlando’ is somehow woven tightly into his delirium, so she uses the drug to silence him when she has to. When she’s alone with him she pretty much lets him rave as he will, for Samuel’s warned her against using the drug too freely.

At first Lando thrashes desperately, so desperately that Cate has to tie him down to prevent him stabbing himself on his broken ribs. Samuel resorts to binding the chest up tightly, as if he actually expects it to have a chance to heal. After another day, though, the patient’s strength is spent and he can’t do more than flinch and shiver as he begs his phantom torturers for mercy. Cate drags the small couch in from the sitting room and puts it along the foot of the bed. The couch is too short and too firm to let her sleep deeply, which is exactly as she wishes. When his cries of fear and pain pierce her thin dreams, she goes to him and calls him by his real name, and sometimes he flickers his good eye open and stares at her and the nightmare seems to pass or at least change.

By the fourth night the blood he heaves after every mouthful of water is no longer bright red, but has turned black and foul-smelling like old coffee grinds. Cate, half wild for want of rest, puts her head down beside him and weeps in defeat. But Samuel, when she sends for him, gives a grudging nod of approval.

“That’s old blood, Catie, curdled from being in his belly. Whatever was bleeding in there might have stopped.”

It goes more easily now because his sheets don’t have to be constantly changed from being fouled with blood. By morning he can take a mouthful of water and although his shoulders work and his breath squeezes between his teeth, he brings nothing up. In the afternoon Samuel comes again, hums and haws over him, and decides to set the arm after all. Lando screams in pain as Samuel pulls the shattered ends of the bone back into alignment and binds the limb to a splint and the splint to Lando’s side. He faints, characteristically, only after Samuel is done and the worst is over.

He wakes sporadically during the following day, still burning, his skin parched and cracking. Cate gives him sugar water and sponges him until her fingers are wrinkled and white from being wet. He’s quieter now, and his delirium gives way to a sort of drifting half-dream state. His eyes are open but static, and more than once Cate puts her hand to his wrist or chest to reassure herself that his heart is still beating, albeit faintly.

At sundown on the sixth day, his fever breaks. The bed linens are soaked with sweat once again and his skin shines golden in the last rays of the day’s light. He wakes with a coughing retching cry, and when Cate puts her hand on his chest to restrain him he feels cool and clammy, and his heart is beating strongly under her palm.

"Am I dead yet?" he says, and is surprised to hear the words actually make it from mind to mouth this time, albeit rounded and slurring, as though he's deeply in the throes of the worst bender (tequila drunk, he thinks of it, and has ever since that time with Bills in Galveston) of his life.

The girl -- woman, he sees, perhaps a bit older than him, and stunningly beautiful, which hadn't escaped him up to this point, but which he hadn't really devoted a lot of time to pondering either -- with her hand on his chest just blinks at him for moment, as though he's surprised her. He remembers her face, remembers her _voice_ , more particularly (he thinks it's her voice anyhow), present in snatches in the skittery remnants of awareness that he recalls of the past few... days or weeks? He doesn't know, but at least days, it has to be. He actually sees her gather herself, seek her voice, and her lips part, but then she doesn't speak. She shakes her head instead, and he wonders if she's afraid to speak to him. Maybe she doesn't want to get to familiar with the man dying in what is almost certainly her bed.

He studies her for a moment, taking in her pale, smooth cheeks and the dark smudges beneath her eyes, the neat fall of her black afternoon dress and the pale silk of her hair, twisted intricately and pinned to the back of her head. She's a lady, clearly, but he remembers where he had been when it (Bills) had happened, and he frowns, trying to reconcile the knowledge with the woman in front of him. It's hard to think, though, with the dull ache in his arm and the fresher, sharper pain in his chest, and his mouth is dry and dusty as death.

It occurs to him that she might not even be real. He's been feverish, he's fairly sure, he remembers the unbearable heat of it, remembers feeling smothered, ripped with chills and then afire with heat. Maybe she's just a fever-dream. Maybe that's why she doesn't talk. Maybe that explains why she can be here, in this place, with girls like Myra who speak English as though it's difficult to master its rules, with double negatives that would have made his mother thump him and turns of phrase that would sound more at home on the lips of a drover.

"Myra," he says abruptly, and the name feels like it tears out of him, harsh and raw, and then he's coughing, helpless, wrenching spasms that somehow make him doubt that he is dreaming anything about this; they are too real.

"Here, drink this," the woman says, and Lando sees that she has a glass and is leaning over him, holding it near his lips.

He manages to get his left hand up, wrapping it around her slim wrist, but he can barely keep his fingers around it, and his hand is shaking like a leaf in a windstorm. She stops, though, and regards him with her clear eyes, her forehead wrinkling in concern. "Myra," he says again, this time without the grating rasp that had pushed him into the coughing fit. "Is she all right? Behind the bed... I don't remember... Did she...?"

Cate nods reassuringly, but she also tips the glass inexorably against his lips and he’s presented with a choice between swallowing and choking and he wisely decides to concentrate on swallowing.

“Myra’s fine,” Cate says, watching the tendon under his jaw work as he slowly but steadily drains the small glass. “Everyone’s fine, except you. And you look like you’ll do all right after all.”

She smiles at him as she takes the empty glass away, and his hand falls back heavily onto the quilt. Cate blots the still discolored and raw corner of his mouth on a towel. The swelling on his face has abated enough to allow both his eyes to open fully, and some of the planes and angles of his features are reemerging. There’s already enough in the straight dark line of his brows and the hollow between his cheekbone and jaw for Cate to see the truth of Myra’s observation: he’s handsome enough to be memorable, or will be when he’s wearing his true face again. After a week, there’s a coat of silky dark hair along his jaw and chin.

“Thank you for looking after her,” Cate says, sitting down in the chair that hasn’t been moved from his bedside since that first night. “I’m Cate; Myra works for me. Do you remember where you are? Do you - ”

Cate hesitates. She wants to send for Samuel again, but she can’t continue to drug her patient now that he’s rational enough to hold himself immobile against the pain in his ribs. And she’s determined that no one else, even Samuel, should find out about Julien’s other name. She needs to be sure he’s lucid enough to dissemble on his own behalf before she brings anyone else in here.

She leans forward, her fingers circling his wrist and settling on his pulse in a gesture that’s become completely instinctive.

“Do you remember your name?” she asks quietly.

There is something in her face, something about her eyes, that sets him on edge. Her fingers are tight around his wrist and there is a tenseness to her lips, as though this question is vitally important, as though it is a test.

"Julien," he tells her, slow and deliberate, and he sees the flicker of her eyes, the knowledge of the lie, but she nods as though satisfied. "What did I say?" he asks, because it is clear that he has said something, that she knows something, but she looks away quickly.

Her hand uncoils from his wrist, and he twists his own hand and catches her fingers. They link together naturally, and he sees her gaze flicker down to the twists of their fingers. He looks as well, sees her long, pale fingers and his darker ones intertwined.

"What did I say?" he asks again, demands this time. It is more important now than it ever has been. And, more importantly, "Who did I say it to?"

From word to word his intonation changes, the vowels turning longer and richer, the consonants softening and running together as he reclaims the French accent that so delighted Myra.

Cate stills. She could pull her hand free, she knows; he’s kitten weak and will be for some time yet. But there’s already unfolding strength in his dark eyes and the tone of his voice. For the first time Cate sees beyond the bruises and broken bones, to the razor-edges of his muscles and the weight of his bones at shoulder and wrist and knuckles.

“No one,” she says. “No one but me. Myra and Liv have nursed you a little, but I kept you quiet - ”

she glances towards the three-quarters empty laudanum bottle by way of explanation,

“ – and the rest of the time I took care of you myself.”

She looks back at him. He’s watching her intently, and there’s more of the wolf in his lean face than she ever expected to see there.

“Julien’s a good name,” she says, dropping her gaze momentarily then looking up again to meet his continuing scrutiny. “I’d like to have Samuel look at you again, and Myra will want to see for herself that you’re awake. Do you think you’re ready for all that?”

He nods, once, but he’s frowning and his attention’s clearly still focused on the question of how badly he’s betrayed himself. Cate, the moment of fierce joy at his survival already falling away into new worries, finds herself suddenly impatient.

“I don’t care,” she says sharply. “You looked after Myra, and the first thing you said when you woke was her name. I don’t care if your name is Julien or – anything else. You won’t be fit to ride for weeks yet, so I’m stuck with you. I haven’t been downstairs for a week – God knows what the customers have made of the house – and I suppose you’ll eat like a field hand, and the room you were in is - ”

She stops abruptly, ducking her head in shamefaced contrition.

“I just mean … I have my own problems, Julien. I'm not going to make trouble for you.”

The color blossoms high on her cheeks, and he watches her tip her head down, eyes briefly closed. Her hand in his clenches for a moment, and he isn't sure what that means, if it's silent apology or just an unconscious reaction to the immense strain she must have been under.

The guilt wells up in his belly, heavy and familiar, and then he squeezes _her_ hand, and she looks up.

"Lando is dead,” he says, and watches her eyes flicker, understanding, wariness, some other things less pressing. “He was well on his way before ... before he came here, and it’d be better if he never left this room. But - I can't ask anything of you."

Her eyes sharpen, and he sees the calculation in them, the understanding, and he can almost feel her gaze boring into his, the force of her will behind it more than merely considerable. There is suspicion there, too, but it's not deep suspicion. It's just plain, sensible wariness, something he understands very well and respects just as much.

“I’m not doing it just for you,” she says. “While you’re in my house, I’d rather have you be whoever is safest for you –- and us. So Lando’s dead, and there’s only Julien now.”

He nods, understanding and agreement, and she gives him a nod that's nearly identical. For a moment he remembers something from boyhood, the same solemn, secretive agreement, and he thinks they should spit in their palms and shake hands. A smiles twists his lips for an instant, short-lived because it's hard to smile at anything when the act of it makes his face feel as though it's going to split and bleed; he sees another tiny start of something in her eyes, and he knows it. He's seen it before, and used it often enough to know it's worth. It's only there for an instant as her eyes flicker, sharp and bright, from his mouth to meet his eyes, and he admires the intelligence there even as her eyes veil themselves. He thinks she should play poker. Hell, maybe she does.

Her face composes itself into something mild and unreadable an instant after her eyes shutter themselves, and he is amused to feel a whisper of heat, a flutter of admiration that owes itself to both her beauty and the clear, bright intelligence in her eyes. "What day is it?" he asks, and blinks at the sound of his own voice, which has blurred a bit, twisted away from the French accent he sometimes still has to concentrate to maintain.

He thinks he must be getting tired, and as soon as the thought crosses his mind the weariness seems to roar through his muscles, washing strength away like sand gives way before water.


	4. A kind of Peace: Lando, Cate, Yuma, 1876

As Samuel points out, Julien has a medicine better than anything that comes in a bottle: youth. One week after he was carried to Cate’s bed, he gets out again for the first time. He’s shaky, it’s true, supported by Myra on one side and Cate on the other. The two women do most of the work and he manages to shuffle as far as the armchair in the corner, from which he watches in bemusement as they strip and remake the bed and do away with the debris of used towels and bowls and medicine bottles. Cate brings his saddlebags from the sitting room and presents them to him with an arched eyebrow.

“Find yourself some linens,” she says. “You’re officially not sick enough to be naked anymore.”

He’s also not sick enough for Cate to go on dressing and undressing with such indifference around him, or for her to continue sleeping on the couch at the foot of the bed. Cate half makes her mind up to spend the night in Liv’s room, but there’s no question of bringing her things down too, since Liv’s already filled every corner and crevice of her quarters with her own fipperies. Cate buys a folding screen and has it brought upstairs and put in the corner of the sitting room. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best she can think of at present.

That evening Cate goes downstairs and begins to take stock of what’s gone on in her absence. Liv, given her youth and inexperience as a manager, has made a remarkable hand of keeping things running. Still, there’s a thousand little and not so little things that need Cate’s attention. It’s well after midnight and Cate’s trying to reconcile the week’s alcohol consumption with the cash box from the bar, when Myra – whose task it’s been to check on Julien every couple of hours - comes flying down the stairs.

“Miss Cate, come up, he’s taken bad.”

“Shit!” Cate says with great venom, picking her skirts up in both hands and running upstairs after Myra fast enough to set her heart pounding inside her corset stays.

Cate runs across the sitting room, into the bedroom, to the thrashing thing on the bed. He’s yelling out, a wordless cry of horror.

“Julien!” Cate says, gripping his shoulders and pressing him back into the pillows.

Even in her fright she realizes that he’s only a little fevered, and already slippery with sweat.

“It’s all right,” Cate says, half to him and half to Myra. “This is just a dream. It’s just a _dream_.”

His eyes flash open, his good hand closing vice-tight around her wrist.

“Julien.”

He doesn’t hear, or doesn’t understand. He sobs in a deep breath and Cate realizes that if he speaks it won’t be with Julien’s voice.

“Myra – go!” Cate snaps and Myra, wringing her hands, backs up a step. “Now. Get out!”

Myra, her face crumpling into tears at Cate’s unaccustomed harshness, bolts. Cate waits just until she hears the sitting room door slam, then she turns on him again.

“Lando! Lando – it’s all right!”

“Cate?” he snarls, his grip on her wrist tight enough to grind the bones painfully.

“It’s me, it’s all right.”

He collapses back, gasping for breath against the restriction of his bandaged ribs.

“Oh Christ,” Cate pants, wiping his hair out of his face.

She calls Myra back and reassures her. Myra helps Cate out of her gown, and after she’s gone Cate goes behind the screen and puts on a nightgown that covers her from chin to toes. She picks up her revolver, its weight dragging at her tired shoulders, and pads barefoot into the bedroom. Lando’s still awake, though he’s blinking heavily. Cate puts the revolver on the dresser, which is the point furthest from the bed but still in the room.

“I can’t keep sleeping on the couch,” she says wearily. “My back is going to break. And I can’t leave you alone; if you start having a nightmare, someone else might come before I do and God knows what you’ll say or do to them. So I’m going to sleep in my bed. And if you so much as look at me sideways, so help me I’ll shoot you. And I can get to that gun a lot quicker than you can.”

Lando just looks at her for long moments, blinking, and she doesn't even wait for a response before she's flinging aside the bedcovers and scooting under them. He blinks, and then it occurs to him that he's currently "looking sideways" at her, and a sound of mirth burbles up from his belly and out his mouth before he can quite stop it.

She turns to look at him, her eyes narrowed, and he bites his lip hard but it's no use. He's laughing and clutching at his side at once, the pain sharp, rhythmic splinters that coincide with the hitching of his breath between laughs, and she is just looking at him like he's off his ever-loving nut, which just makes it funnier.

"I believe you really would," he says, his voice dipping and swirling, an odd mix of Julien and Lando, because he's just too bloody tired to actually maintain the concentration necessary to keep Julien in his voice. "You'd shoot me!" he repeats, and then he's laughing again, his left hand clamped to his right side as though to steady the shifting bones beneath his skin.

"Damn straight, I would," she maintains, her voice absolutely level, and he laughs almost soundlessly for nearly a full minute, helpless, until he's exhausted with it.

"Contrary woman," he murmurs finally, and she makes a soft noise that isn't quite a gasp. "Spend all this time and energy making sure I didn't die, and then threaten to shoot me if I 'look sideways' at you." He snorts softly, his mind still ticking at it, amusement and at least a slight measure of indignation at the implication that he's untrustworthy, but he doesn't actually manage to twit her anymore before he feels himself drifting back into grey sleep, oddly comforted by the whole thing.

The nightmares come three, four, five times a night. Sometimes it’s enough to call him Julien and shake him awake, but more often it isn’t until she says ‘Lando’ that he comes back to himself. Cate takes to sleeping with one hand resting on his chest, so that his first shudder will wake her and she can rouse him before the dream has time to sink its claws in deeply. Her shoulder begins to ache from the constant stretch, and the only way she can ease it is to close the gap between his body and hers. In the course of one hellish night when he wakes every hour, shaking and sweating and begging for death, she finally crosses the few inches that separate them and curls herself against his uninjured side. His fingers weave into hers and he holds tight, but doesn’t say anything. In the morning they wake tangled together and Cate sort of scoots away from him before his eyes are really open, but that night when she comes to bed she moves close again. When he goes to say something, she cuts him off abruptly.

“It’s to help the dreams – if I don’t get a real night’s sleep soon I’ll drop dead.”

They do better, though he still wrenches them both awake a few times a night.

Another few days and he’s well enough to be underfoot downstairs. He holds court in the front parlor, doing card tricks with his one good hand and teaching the girls French phrases likely to be useful in their line of work. Cate’s estimation of his ability to eat turns out to be an understatement; the only time he isn’t hungry is when he’s asleep and sometimes the growl of his stomach is what wakes him.

By the eighteenth day he is getting restless, feeling dodgy, and they have their first fight. He's gained back most of the weight he'd lost, and he feels stronger; he hasn't passed out (Cate likes to use the term "fainted" when she refers to it, and he has no doubt that's quite deliberate) in days. When evening closes in and she comes round to the table where he's entertaining Sarah and Deborah with some simple sleight of hand, he tells Cate he'd just as soon stay downstairs, if it's all the same to her.

Apparently it's not all the same to her.

She has plenty of reasons why that's the stupidest idea she's ever heard, a baker's dozen, in fact, and Lando listens stone-faced to them for fully five minutes before he turns around and walks away while she's still in mid-sentence.

He's not fool enough to earn her enmity by outright arguing with her, especially not in front of the girls, though she doesn't seem to have the same compunctions about arguing with him in front of them. Or berating him, rather, as it takes two to argue.

He sulks upstairs for about half the night, listening to the business below him, the occasional tune on the piano, the voices raised in merriment. He's never really been able to hold on to a good, prolonged funk, however, and by the time she makes her way upstairs he's thought it through enough to admit that her concerns are mostly sensible and reasonable.

She brings him a slice of pie when she comes up, and for the first time she asks if he might give her a hand with the eight hundred -- or so it seems, with only one hand to work with, and that his stupid hand -- tiny buttons aligned along her spine.

Lando recognizes a peace offering when he sees one, and manages to do it without any smart-arsed comments.

As she's undressing behind the screen, she holds something out over the top of it, and it turns out to be a pouch of tobacco and papers left by some gent or another, which she says happens all the time. He thanks her kindly and rolls a cigarette.

On the nineteenth day he talks about leaving, and she nods in all the right places, listens intently, and then sends for Dr. Jackson who explains to Lando in exquisitely horrifying detail the sort of damage he could do to himself if he manages to unset his ribs before they fully heal.

Lando allows that he might stay a while longer after all.

After the doctor leaves, he asks Cate if there's anything left in the kitchen, and she smiles at him for the first time.

It's not the first time he's seen her smile, not at all, but it's definitely the first smile she gives to _him_ , the first freely given, and he feels his heart pounding in his chest so hard that he thinks he might pass out for a second, so quick and unfamiliar is the feel of it. Of course, she's been worried, and her expression ranging from concerned to annoyed when she looked at him, indulgent to suspicious as well, and he can't really blame her for not having a smile for him before now. Even the smiles he'd witnessed, those not actually directed at him, had been fairly few and far between.

It doesn't stop him coveting it, and for the first time he starts to feel a bit awkward around her. She's older than him, and as lovely and graceful as a woman can be; Julien La Fleur is a charming scoundrel, he has manners and wit, but especially injured as he is, he's got nothing on Cate.

He starts watching her when she isn't aware of him, especially the way she handles the girls, and smoothing up Julien's rough edges. If she notices, she doesn't say; he thinks that she does.

When she is aware of him there, he expends a lot of his energy making her smile, and coins the nickname "Sunshine" -- and he'll take his reasons to the grave with him, thank you kindly -- which she seems to both like and dislike. It amuses him, the duality of the reaction, but he thinks he understands it.

At night she curls into his side with her head on his shoulder. Sometimes he wakes with his fingers curled around hers. Sometimes he wakes with wet cheeks, and she never says anything about it.

Once, after a particularly bad night, he tells her she should have let him die (he may or may not have been entirely awake when he said it; he isn't sure, now, because he remembers the thirty seconds after that so vibrantly, so clearly, that it seems to somehow blur out what had preceded it) and she slaps him so hard he sees stars, her white face a bright, strained oval in the moonlight. He's so surprised that he doesn't do anything at all, just looks at her; her hand goes to her mouth, and he sees it's shaking.

He considers her for long moments, aware that he is suddenly hard. He's always found her beautiful, but he's never seriously thought about doing anything about it. After a moment she lets her hand fall away from her mouth and her shoulders go back as she straightens.

He lets it go. He is by no means certain of what her reaction might be; hell, at this point he isn't sure he's even capable of doing what he's thinking about doing. But he isn't willing to scare or upset her, not even a little.

Instead he apologizes, and she nods silently, and when the sun comes up an hour or so later, they are both still awake.

On the twenty-third day, he finds out from Liv that the fact that Cate doesn't bring gentlemen to her rooms has nothing to do with Lando being in them.

On the twenty-fourth day, he talks Cate into letting him teach a couple of the girls to deal Faro and set up a table in the taproom, and when she comes up later that night she looks so damned pleased with herself that he laughs at her until she whacks him sharply on the top of the head with her bloody fan. He sulks until she can't quite keep herself from snickering at him, and then they both chortle like loons for a while.

On the twenty-fifth day, he realizes that she's been calling him Lando during the daylight hours as well as when he wakes himself up at night, and he's not entirely sure when that started. It worries him for all of a minute and a half or so, before he admits to himself that she's never made a mistake downstairs, and like as not, she never will. Not a woman like her.

And he's oddly comfortable with that.

On the twenty-sixth day, about four hours in, he wakes up drenched in his own sweat, the faint echo of some kind of cry still hanging in the air, and his throat feels raw and parched. For a moment his belly clenches and twists with fear, and he thinks, _The fever's come back_ , but it passes quickly as the memory of the dream he'd been embroiled in burbles slowly up into his waking mind.

He glances over, and isn't terribly surprised to see Cate's awake, half sitting up but a little ways back from him. Her eyes are bright and wide, reflecting moonlight, and she's got one hand to her jaw.

It takes him a few seconds to realize what must have happened, why she's so far from him -- more often than not, he wakes with her nearly on top of him, sometimes with one of her legs thrown across his thighs to stop him thrashing, almost always with Cate's hands wrapped around his upper arms, inevitably with her touching him in _some_ way -- and he sits up so quickly he feels briefly light headed.

"Oh," he breathes, and Cate straightens up, her hand falling away from her face. He doesn't see anything, no mark, no bump, but it doesn't matter. Even by the barely there shadowlight in the room, he can see the truth of it in her face. "Oh, Damn."

"It's all right," she says, and her voice is only a little unsteady. "I'm fine."

Which isn't the point at all, as he sees it. Not at all. "Oh, Cate." His left hand rises up without his permission and he touches the line of her jaw with his fingertips. She doesn't flinch, but she does turn her head, letting him look. He can't see well enough to be sure, but he guesses it will bruise. Even just flailing, even if it had been glancing, he doesn't see how his hand (or his fist, which is likely more realistic, considering what he remembers from the dream) could _not_ leave a bruise on that pale, soft skin. "I'm so sorry," he says softly, but he sounds almost angry to his own ears, and he knows it's time for him to go. He should have gone the week before, whatever the doctor had said.

He's half off the bed before she manages to catch hold of him. He turns back, prepared to listen to her repeating all the reasons that he'd be a fool to leave (and then go anyhow), but all she says is, "don't."

He's caught off guard enough that he just blinks at her, doesn't say anything at all, and she takes advantage of his silence, and says, "I'm tired, Lando. Just come back to bed."

He finds himself doing it before he really thinks about it (though he will think of it tomorrow, when the purple starts to blossom on her jaw, and he will hate himself for being weak); he is so tired and he hurts, and she is so warm. She tucks herself into his side without any apparent hesitation, and that alone helps, that she isn't shrinking away from him.

"I'm sorry," he says again, because he can't quite stop himself.

"Go to sleep," is all she says, but her hand curls comfortingly around his where it's resting on his belly, and it's easier than he can believe to drift back to sleep.

He doesn't have any more dreams that night, at least.


	5. Demons: Cate, Lando, Yuma, 1876

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When Lando dreams, he struggles. Sometimes he fights so hard he wakes himself up, gasping for air and kicking at the bedclothes. When Cate comes to consciousness, he’s already falling back into the pillows and clawing his good hand through his hair. More often, though, she wakes while he’s still tight in the dream’s coils, roused by the twist and toss of his head, the flex and shudder of his body, the half-cries catching in his throat. But whether he wakes himself or she wakes him, the point is that Lando fights back and by doing so he escapes the nightmare.

Cate’s not that lucky; in her dreams, she’s helpless.

Sometimes she tries to run, though she knows it’s useless: her feet are dull and stupid and she stumbles at the first or second step and falls to her hands and knees. More often, she can’t even do that, and just stands rooted to the spot. She can’t even open her mouth, and her stifled scream clogs thickly in her throat.

Sometimes she dreams herself in her bed, and in her dream she thrashes and screams. Lando wakes and puts his hands on her, shaking her, and she twists free of the dream and she’s safe. Except, her waking is a dream too, and in reality she’s still lying paralyzed by sleep with hardly a flurry in the rhythm of her breath to betray the hell she’s trapped in. The hands on her limbs aren’t Lando’s, and the face grinning down at her isn’t his.

Sometimes Lando’s demons wake them both half-a-dozen times in the course of a single night. Lando wipes his fingers wearily over his face and says ‘sorry, sorry’. Cate shakes her head and tells him it’s alright, there’s nothing to apologize for. She’ll never tell him that he’s saved her from her own dreams more than once. It’s almost worse on the rare nights when he sleeps easily and Cate’s left to surface slowly from the clinging depths herself. She wakes with her heart pounding and tears sliding from her eyes into her hair, but her skin is cool and her breathing scarcely ruffled.

By daylight and lamplight, Cate’s demons are silent, if not absent. There have been small betrayals, which Lando does not see, or does not understand, or does not choose to comment on. He is sitting at the long table in the back kitchen when Cate fumbles the knife she’s using to cut an apple, stabbing the small wicked blade into the heel of her left hand. She doesn’t cry out; instinctively she curls her hand and buries it in her lap so he won’t see what she’s done. She doesn’t cry out, either, the night he thrashes in his sleep and catches her full-square on the jaw with his clenched fist. The pain of the blow is nothing compared to the crushing weight of familiarity in the way she braces herself for more.

There’s reminiscence, too, when she tilts her mirror to examine the purple-black bruise that forms where he hit her. She powders over the damage as well as she can before she goes downstairs in the evening, but she feels the mark like a physical weight. She carries her head a little higher, but her eyes slide away from those of the men in the house just a little sooner than she’d wish.

It’s not much past midnight when the last customer leaves, and the girls are bundling soiled bed-linens and corking bottles and fretting over a torn hem. Cate fills a plate with unserved food and takes it up to Lando. She usually lets him wait until she’s done tallying the cash and locking up for the night, but she’s making a small concession to his growing frustration with his solitary confinement during the evening business hours.

Lando’s lying among the pillows on the bed, barefoot and shirtless, half-asleep but idling his deck of cards through the fingers of his good hand.

“All done?” he asks.

“Almost, I won’t be long.”

Cate makes her way back down to the parlor. She’s halfway down the broad flight of front stairs when she realizes something’s wrong. Some of the girls have already come up, but those still in the parlor are standing stock still, staring at the single late-come customer –

\- Cate freezes, not just her body but her breath and perhaps even her heart too. All she can see of him over the banister rail is the top half of his back, his shoulders, the back and side of his head. It’s enough. It’s so much more than enough.

Adrien.

 _This is a dream_ , Cate thinks, and even as she thinks it she imagines thrashing and screaming and Lando’s hands firm and hard on her arms.

Soft and silent as a thought, Cate reaches back with one hand and muffles the folds of her skirt. Then slowly, so slowly, she eases her weight back up onto her lagging foot. She turns, the paper whisper of her silk gown almost deafening in her straining ears. She goes up a step, another. Her heart shudders free of restraint, pounding in her chest. Another step, another, quicker now, but she won’t run because if she tries to run she’ll fall and then he’ll

she hurries along the landing and makes the turn to the upper staircase. She gathers her skirts and goes up quickly and lightly. She opens the door to her rooms, twisting through and closing it again in one soft motion, turning the key in the lock for the first time in weeks. She steps swiftly across the sitting room to the threshold of the bedroom.

  
“Hey, Sunshine, that was - ”

Lando stops, his smile curdling on his lips. Cate can only imagine what she looks like, to bring that look of dismay into his eyes.

“You have to get out,” she says, already striding into the room and gathering up the debris of his shirts and shaving kit and stuffing it all haphazardly into his saddlebags. “I’m going to go downstairs again, and you’re going to come down the back way and go out through the kitchen. If you can’t manage your saddle, just drag it out behind the stable and lead your horse down as far the creek gully. I’ll send someone to help you as soon as – as soon as I can.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell’s going on,” Lando says, tossing his cards away and rolling off the bed onto his feet.

Cate, to her complete humiliation, feels tears welling in her eyes and a sob clogging her throat so that when she speaks her voice is thick and broken.

“Please. If he finds you here he’ll kill you. Lando, please, don’t do this. Damnit - ” she swipes angrily at the tears running freely down her cheeks, “ – please, just go. You can’t help me. You can’t help me and _damn it_ , I worked too hard to keep you alive. Let me have that. Let me know I kept that.”

She’s crying in earnest now, sobs heaving through her body and tears falling fast enough to make her vision swim, and Lando’s staring at her as if he can’t believe that she _can_ cry like this.

“He? Who’s _he_?” Lando demands.

Cate drops her face into her hands, smearing the mess of tears into her palms. Lando grips her hard by the arm, and it’s the red-hot shock of pain that steadies her enough to answer.

“My husband,” she says, throwing the words at him because defiance is all she has left now. “I’m married.”

Lando says nothing, literally stunned into silence for long moments. _Married_? he thinks, and the word might as well be empty of meaning for all the sense that his mind can make of it. He says nothing, standing with his good hand digging fingertips into her biceps until she twitches, and he realizes he must be hurting her.

He can't see it in her face, though, and he flashes suddenly to how silent she had been the night when he woke up knowing that he'd hit her though she hadn't made a sound, seeing her watching him with nothing in her eyes. No surprise, no pain, and the only sign of fear had been the fact that she had been so, so still. Like a woman with a snake in her bed.

He narrows his eyes, and then instead of letting her go he turns and drags her to the bed.  She resists his downward push, but he's not interested in taking no for an answer. He tightens his grip until something twitches on her face, the barest flicker of a wince, and she sinks down onto the edge of the bed.

He lets go of her arm and drops to his haunches in front of her. "You're married and your husband is here," he says, and she gives a slow, unsteady nod. Her lower lip trembles for an instant before her lips tighten into a thin line. "If he comes up and finds me here, you think he'll kill me."

It's not really a question, and Lando thinks it's probably a fairly accurate assumption. What man wouldn't, should he come home and find another man laid up in his wife's bed? Even an injured man.

But.

This doesn't smell right.

Cate is a strong woman. Lando would have bet dimes to dollars that he would never see this, see her cracking and breaking like this right in front of his eyes. Something is very very wrong here; Lando can smell her fear, high and sour and sharp, but at the same time, he can see the stubborn line of her jaw (marked with the purple-black bruise he had left there himself, the very sight of which makes him feel sick with guilt and shame), the tight set of her lips, and he understands that pushing her is unlikely to provide him with any information.

He's never heard anything about Cate being married. Not from Cate, not from any of the girls, not from a single soul, ever. He studies her face, streaked with tears, and the way her hands are twisted together in her skirts, knuckles white, and the slump of her shoulders, defeated, and he thinks he understands some of it.

Not all of it, but he won't ask. She won't tell, he can see that plainly enough, and maybe he doesn't want to know everything, but he understands enough.

She is married, and terrified of that fact, of the man, of his presence here. She ran away from him, Lando guesses, and now he is back, in her business, her _whorehouse_ and she is going to have to face her past.

Lando knows all about facing one's past. He barely made it out of his confrontation alive, and much of that due to Cate.

"What do you want me to do?" he asks, but he already knows. She wants him to run, leave her to her fate. It's all over her face, and they're enough alike for him to even understand it. He'd want her to do the same, if Billy comes back.

Cate tries to gather some scrap of control, just some remnant she can hang onto long enough to get Lando away. But her body’s poisoned with fear and all her will can’t make it obey now. Her shoulders heave in wracking sobs, even as she blinks tears out of her eyes and grits her teeth together.

“I want you to go,” she says fiercely, but she can’t stand to look at him, to meet the wide worried look in his dark eyes. She has to turn her head away, and close her own eyes tight. “Just go. I can’t bear it if -- ”

She shudders, and the sound that tears itself free from her throat is the animal cry of bereavement. Lando hisses as if in pain, and his hand finds hers in the folds of her skirt. Cate gasps for breath. She has to stop crying; he’ll never leave her while she’s like this. And she’s running out of time. Adrien could be coming up here right now.

Cate turns on him, her eyes suddenly burning as dry as coals.

“You have to go. You _owe_ me, Lando. He’s my husband. I’m telling you to leave. I don’t want him to know that you and I -- ”

She stops abruptly, because, God, what can she reproach him with? But she doesn’t need to say any more; Lando’s gaze drops away from hers and he stands, letting his hand fall from hers and stepping back. He doesn’t say anything; he just nods without looking at her.

Cate pushes up onto her feet and her head jerks up and back, a reflexive gesture of terror that she can’t control. She steps past Lando, and goes out of the bedroom and across the sitting room. He moves behind her, following but not intercepting her. Cate stops at the door, and wipes her hands over her face. She’s going to Adrien with her eyes red and her face bruised. She wonders if he’ll be more incensed thinking that someone else put a fist to his property, or less so because at least someone’s been using her as he sees fit.

Cate wipes her fingers across her nose and mouth, snuffling herself into something like a normal expression, and turns the key in the lock. She wants desperately to say something, some word of parting, but she knows the only thing her throat will yield now is a cry of anguish.

She turns her head, risking a last glance only because he’s standing between her and the lamp, and she can’t see his face properly. The tears swim in her eyes again, and he’s nothing but a dark form, tall and slim, with his curls turned copper red by the reflected light.

Cate takes a slow inhale, sets her chin high, and turns her back on him. She’s going to do this. She’s going to go downstairs and --

\-- no matter what, whether Adrien kills her or just makes her wish he had, she’s going to have this and he won’t be able to touch it. She’s going to have Lando, alive and away from here.

He watches her leave, and he can hardly look at her without his hands curling into fists, can barely stand to let her go, and he feels his body tremble with the need to launch himself forward, catch her, stop her as she turns back to look at him in the doorway with her face still wet with tears. She looks like she's marching to her own execution. Her back is absolutely straight, her chin up, and it's nothing less than he'd expect from her. He stills his tongue and his feet, which want to rage at her and chase after her, respectively, and just waits, just watches her go. She closes the door softly and he doesn't even hear her footsteps on the stairs.

He thinks it may be for the best that she doesn't know him very well.

Otherwise she'd have known better. Bills would've known better, even two years ago. He is no more capable of leaving Cate in the hands of a man that makes her cry like that (God, the sound of her crying, it's the worst thing he's ever heard, it's the sound he would've made himself, he thinks, if he'd been capable of making a sound at all when Bills had left him dying on the floor of one of the downstairs rooms; grief and loss and rage against the universe, and his belly clenches with fury on her behalf) than he is capable of putting a gun to her head and shooting her. He would never. Never.

And from a purely pragmatic perspective, entirely aside from the safety and well being of Cate and her girls, this is very bad for him. This place has become his refuge for the time being.

He came closer to dying here than he likes to think about. Nevertheless, this is the only safe place for him to be right now. He knows it. He had seen it clearly on Billy's face. He still knows how to read Billy well enough to know that he won't come back here.

Also, there will be loose ends to tie up, tallies to even, and he has to have time to mend if he intends to repay old debts.

Aside from that, Cate has been good to him. Cate and her girls, in spite of the inconvenience (as she refers to it often enough) and in spite of the danger (though she's never asked if Billy -- Lando doesn't even think she knows Billy's name, unless perhaps he's screamed it out in his sleep, which isn't outside the realm of possibility -- might come back here; maybe she knows that if he honestly thought that Bills would ever come back, Lando would never have stayed), they've been good to him.

He thinks perhaps Cate is even becoming fond of him.

Not that she would ever admit it. She is a guarded woman. But Lando makes his living playing cards, reading the faces and body language of men far colder than she could ever be, and he thinks he is growing on her.

And for his part, he likes Cate. He's grateful to her, yes, but he _likes_ her. He likes it here.

He flexes the fingers of his right hand thoughtfully. That arm is still bound up close to his chest, and he can feel how the muscles have weakened already. It aches dully almost all the time, but he can move it. And he might need it.

When he opens the door, he hears nothing from downstairs. There should be laughing and teasing (he slices the bandage holding his right arm to his body -- that arm shrieks with pain, and he knows he will pay for this later -- with a knife from the belt slung across the back of a chair, and then sheathes it and gets the belt around his waist, working the buckles awkwardly with his left hand), and the sounds of things being washed (there's no time for shirt or boots, he decides) and tidied and the girls saying goodnight to each other.

The silence is even clearer and more incorrect out on the landing. His right arm feels like there is a white-hot needle through the elbow and a railroad spike through his forearm, but he knows how to put pain aside and remain silent as he stalks down the stairs to the landing.

He slithers down the last three steps of the second floor riser on his left hip and elbow, peering around the corner to take in the scene downstairs. This is all he has, four knives and the element of surprise, and there's a good chance that a man that can make Cate cry like that (broken) is a man that could kill Lando even on his best day (which is certainly not today), but there isn't anything else he can do.

Cate stops just inside the doorway of the parlor, and for an instant all she can see is the fear-edged expressions of the girls. Then Adrien swings around, and Cate sees his glass-blue eyes, and there nothing for her in this world except fear.

Someone cries out, but it isn’t Cate, and the first blow of Adrien’s fist clips her on the cheekbone hard enough to spin her around and she hits her hip on the corner of the upright piano. She catches herself, two-handed. One of the girls is sobbing, and Cate almost warns her, _don’t do that_. Tears are permissible, though he’ll sneer mercilessly at them, but any kind of audible complaint is simply not tolerated.

Cate shakes her head, trying to clear the thick red haze of the blow. But she’s out of practice; she’s still stunned and sickened when he grabs her by the back of the neck and yanks her up against him. His fingernails dig into the nape of her neck; she’d forgotten -- _forgotten_? -- how prodigal he can be with his cruelty. No pain is too petty for him to inflict.

“A fucking whore,” he says softly, and the ruffle of his breath (hot and sweet with the smell of whiskey) against her ear makes Cate squirm and tremble. “You became a fucking whore, Ellie. But then, you always were, weren’t you?”

Cate whimpers, then clasps her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound before it can get any worse.

“Did you learn something from all those men fucking you?” he says, shaking her a little. “Did you fucking learn something worth knowing, you fucking _cunt_?”

He shoves her off and Cate half stumbles over her train, but rights herself. Liv takes half a step forward, but Cate shakes her head fiercely.

“I’ll fucking get to you, bitch,” Adrien growls at Liv, and Liv sort of stifles a sob, because Liv’s smart and learns the rules quickly. “You’ll get your turn.”

He turns on Cate again, catching her by the twist of her hair.

“Lovely establishment you’ve got here; quite the fucking businesswoman, aren’t you? If I’d known this was here, I wouldn’t have been dragging backwards and forwards across this God-forsaken territory trying to scrape up a fucking honest dime.”

Cate hisses in mingled pain and anger at that; Adrien’s never worked for a cent if he could steal or swindle or seduce for it instead. 

“But you’ve been a fine little manager, all the same,” he goes on, and the hand that’s not gripping Cate’s hair painfully tight digs into the curve of her corset over her breast. “But I’m here now, dear, and I’ll have the run of things.”

Cate sobs in pain and shame, turning her face against his shoulder to hide from the girls’ looks of horror and fear.

“Get out,” she says through her tears, and Adrien actually freezes for a second.

Then Cate twists in his grip enough to look at her girls.

“All of you -- get out, he can’t -- ”

Adrien shoves her off to arm’s length and his fist catches her above her eye socket and this time her head seems to explode in heat and the smell of struck iron.

“You stay put or I’ll fucking kill her, you hear me?” he shouts, jerking his right-hand gun free of its holster.

The girls cling to each other, some crying in bewilderment, others staring in all too miserable comprehension. Adrien turns on Cate again, shoving her to her knees. She puts her hand to her face and it comes away sticky and bright red. Cate hiccups out a sob, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she’s undone enough that she actually cries out when he grabs her by the hair again and yanks her head back and digs the gun barrel into the vulnerable flesh beneath her jaw.

“Look at that, Ellie,” he says. “Stupid fucking women. If they had any fucking spine they’d walk out that door and let me blow your brains out all over that whore’s dress you’re wearing. But they won’t. They’ll stay here, and let me do whatever the fuck I want to them, just like you do. Beat you fucking bloody, and spit on you, and fuck you until it runs down your legs, because that’s all a cunt’s good for.”

For a long moment, endless and painful, Cate on the floor is Lando and Lando is Cate; it's like being twinned, and for a moment he's looking up at Bills from his knees, staring into the dead green depths of Bills' eyes, seeing the vast and horrible lack of anything behind them, and he has to close his eyes for just a second, has to force that out of his head, force himself to see the lie in it. It's not the same at all. Lando may be Cate and Cate may be Lando, but the man standing over Cate is not and never could be Billy. Billy doesn't abuse the innocent (never mind that he had, once, never mind because he'd been told lies and he'd been made to suffer, and Lando can forgive him that, though he will never forget), and Billy would never talk to a human being that way, woman or otherwise; Billy has no place here. This has nothing to do with Billy, nothing to do with Lando, and it will only make it worse, make it harder, if he can't remember that.

By the time he gets to his feet, he has put Bills away (as much as he ever can, anyhow, and he has no illusions that it will ever be completely). He focuses instead on the blood on Adrien’s fist. There is blood on Cate's face as well, but he doesn't look at that. There is a difference between the decision to fight and the blood lust that _compels_ a fight. If he sees Cate's face bloodied, he will cease to think. He knows this about himself. He has been here before, not exactly the same, but he's stood on the edge of blood lust and known that he could easily cross over. He can't afford that here. He is too hurt to fight furious; he needs to fight smart.

From this angle, he could get a knife into the man with his gun jammed into Cate's jaw, but the risk is too great. If his hand spasms in death, or if he doesn't die immediately, he will kill Cate.

Lando needs a distraction. Unfortunately, he has only himself.

Nothing to do but put himself in harm’s way to accomplish his ends, and oddly enough, it doesn't bother him much. His life belongs to Cate, in a way. Without her, he surely wouldn't have it. Only right to put it on the table for her, and play his cards with as much luck and skill as he's got.

"Monsieur," he says, soft and low, and as he had hoped, the gun comes up, the man's teeth bared and his eyes narrowed as he sees Lando there, but Lando is already moving (and so is the man, he is dragging Cate up, probably to use as a shield, and if it's true, if the man is Cate's husband, he must not get a shot off), going over the banister because there is no other way, down the stairs would take too long and give the bastard a chance to track him.  He throws the knife in his hand before he quite lands because he has to, has to do it before the son of a bitch gets Cate up far enough to protect him entirely.

It takes him in the right shoulder and his hand spasms, the gun falls heavily to the floor, a thunk quickly followed by the scrape of metal on wood as it slides across the bare floorboards to fetch up near the wall.

 _Good_ , Lando thinks, and lands hard, the jolt sending a nauseating bolt of cold pain through his right arm, and he goes to one knee as his feet hit the floor, abruptly conscious of the icy sweat already beading his face. From the corner of his eye he sees Cate's husband snarl furiously (he doesn't cry out, though Lando can see the undecorated bone hilt of his own knife sprouting from the man's shoulder like a pale, improbably lethal tree branch) and he hurls Cate across the room furiously, either an unthinking reaction to the pain or to get her out of his way.  Either way it's a mistake, and Lando's glad to see it.

Cate stumbles into Liv's arms, and Lando catches sight of Cate's face without meaning to, pauses and sees the blood and the terror and her already swollen eye, sees the bruise he'd left himself on Cate's lovely, lovely skin, and something goes cold and bright in his mind, a brittle, icy stillness settles there.

Then Cate's husband is going for his other gun, and Lando is rolling to one side and up to his feet, his mind seared clean and intent, the pain of seconds ago distant and muted.

 _Brought a knife to a gunfight, Bills_ , he thinks, aware of the smile on his face, the slow, cold flicker of it. He's never felt it, not like this, but he's seen it. Not bloodlust, this, no; something better and purer and infinitely calmer, and he feels almost like he's not hurrying at all when his eyes flicker down to the holster (the problem, he sees, is that the son of a bitch is wearing his guns like a gunslinger, low on both hips, but he's so drunk, hurt, or scared right now that he's hanging the sight on the leather, very stupid mistake, one not even Lando would make, and he hasn't held a pistol in two years) and back to the man's face. _Brave as hell or the foolhardiest soul in existence, you'd be so bloody proud._

Liv and Jewel each have a hand to Cate, half-supporting her and half-clinging to her. But Cate’s steady enough on her feet, and she’s hardly aware of Jewel crying in fear or Liv trying to pull Cate further back into the corner out of harm’s way – a notion that makes Cate sputter a liquidly red sound of almost amusement.

Lando’s moving again, a swift duck and slide to one side, and Cate can’t reconcile the quality of that movement and the dead-white composure of Lando’s face with everything she knows about the pain that still twists through him when he sits or stands incautiously, the little wince that flickers on his face when he tries to wriggle the fingers of his right hand. That hand – of course, he looks wrong because he’s properly balanced, both arms in motion – comes up and Cate sees with dreamlike clarity the poetry of the arc his fingers make as the knife takes flight. And then, like an inelegant word-choice, the motion of his wrist stutters and even to Cate’s inexpert eye something is wrong, and the knife strikes Adrien hilt first on the left arm and clatters harmlessly away. Adrien flinches anyway, his drink-sodden brain taking an instant to catch up with the situation. Adrien would never choose to face another man – even one as injured as she knows Lando to be – in this condition; sot-drunk is only allowable for beating a woman who won’t fight back.

Lando’s left hand is twisting behind his back, going for another knife tucked into his belt. Adrien’s left gun finally comes free of its holster; Lando just shoves forward, one hand still in the small of his back and the other hanging uselessly at his side, and catches Adrien chest to chest, knocking them both off balance.

Lando yells in pain at the impact, a raw animal sound that he clamps down on abruptly, and Cate has to clap her hand over her own mouth to stifle her answering cry. Adrien’s gun comes up, but Lando’s so close that Adrien can’t quite get a bead on him and then Lando _shoves_ again and this time he cries out in earnest but the blade of his knife arcs past Adrien’s hand and Adrien roars out too and the gun – and something raw red dead flesh white Christ he’s lost a couple of fingers along with the gun - drops heavily onto the floor next to Lando’s bare feet. Lando’s knife swings back, a flourish to the original sweep, and buries itself in Adrien’s side. Lando staggers, and both men convulse in pain, clutching at each other to stay upright.

Lando yanks the knife free again, and there’s a swift tide of red down Adrien’s waist and hip, and he folds down onto his knees. Lando sways, and the knife slips out of his blood slick fingers and clatters on the floor.

It’s so quiet, Cate can hear the faintly liquid sound of Lando’s breathing. Out of all the blood smearing and spattering on hands and clothes, Cate sees only the tiny vivid bubble breaking at the corner of Lando’s mouth. Adrien’s bending forward, his right hand scrabbling weakly at one of the fallen guns. Cate can’t imagine how he can make his fingers obey at all, with Lando’s knife still buried in his shoulder. Then she thinks about Lando, compelling his own broken body to do what it shouldn’t be able to.

Lando stoops, awkward and off-balance, and grips the knife in Adrien’s shoulder left-handed and twists. Adrien’s head comes up with a jerk and he howls in pain. Lando kicks out, bare heel catching Adrien in mid-chest and knocking him onto his back. Adrien scrabbles back a little.

“What the fuck?” Adrien spits. “You’ve got no fucking right. She’s my fucking _wife_. Whatever you paid for her, that’s _hire_. I fucking  own her. I can do whatever the fuck I want with her. Jesus, there’s a whole houseful of whores here; pick one of the others. She’s a fucking _cunt_ just the same as the rest.”

Lando's left hand balls up and swings, backhanded fist, without the need for thought, catching the son of a bitch squarely across the jaw. Lando feels it crunch, and blood sprays from the man's broken mouth in a vivid crimson fan, splattering across Lando's chest and face. He ignores it. It's not important. "You watch your goddamned mouth," Lando hears himself growl without a trace of Julien in it, but he can't bother with it now. He's too hurt, he's too angry, and he wants to kill this man (something he has never before honestly wanted to do, kill another man) as himself, wants him dead at his own hands, and he has no idea when he'd fallen to his knees, but he guesses it must have happened when he had leaned forward to hit the bastard.

His right arm is lifeless at his side, he cannot feel it, and it had been a vastly huge mistake to try to use that arm to throw. He hadn't been thinking. It had been habit, instinct, and now he is paying for it. And he's lucky, lucky as hell, that Cate's husband is drunk and slow, because he could have easily paid for that mistake with his life if the man had got his gun up just a little faster.

Blood is pounding in his head and in his ears. Lando doesn't take his eyes off of the man in front of him. Blood from his newly mangled hand has soaked his shirt and the floor under his knee, and Lando can smell it, sharp in his nostrils. Lando is furious, hurt and furious, and the man is glaring up at him with murder in his eyes, and impossibly, he's still trying to get to his feet, perhaps too drunk to know that he's dying already.

Lando shoves, left hand whamming into the center of the man's chest, knocking him onto his back again; he utters a short bark of pain as his bleeding stumps bounce off of the wooden floor. Lando snarls and shifts, driving a knee into his shoulder, forcing him prone. The man is hurt, badly hurt, bleeding from shoulder and hand and side, perhaps mortally wounded (though Lando thinks quite well of Samuel's skills, so perhaps not, with immediate medical attention). His cheeks are glittery and wet with tears of pain, but he is snarling up at Lando with white hate.

"You own nothing, nothing," Lando whispers, and reaches for his the knife buried in the man's shoulder, without thinking, with his right hand. His arm shrieks agony as he tries to move it, and for a moment he sways, faint with pain, and nearly greys out. His vision clears because he won't let it go all the way dark, his life depends on it not going dark right now (he can taste blood on the back of his tongue from whatever damage he's done to himself inside, and for a moment his head swims with memory, the memory of leaning against Billy, tasting blood like this in the back of his throat, unable to understand where it had come from), and he shifts and reaches for the knife with his left hand instead, grimly ignoring the way his right arm is dangling at his side.

He feels a moment of towering, engulfing fury at Bills for this, for hurting him like this, for leaving him like this to face a man who wants him dead, with injuries so severe he feels like he might be dying himself, but there is no time for that now.

“Oh, God,” Cate husks, and Lando wants to ignore her, too. She can't make this decision, she shouldn't have to, and he doesn't want to look, doesn't want to know what she thinks of him in this moment, but he can't help it. Her voice is clotted with blood and fear and grief, and he does look, frozen for the moment with the tip of his knife set lightly against her husband's throat.

Lando’s face is masked in blood, and Cate can’t tell how much of it is his. His lips are curled back from his teeth in a grimace that’s as much pain as anger, and he’s staring up at her in mingled challenge and appeal. Cate feels herself slide out of focus, as if it’s impossible for her skin to contain both Adrien’s Ellie and Lando’s Cate.

“You willing to hang for that fucking whore?” Adrien coughs.

Lando’s expression doesn’t change, and the only motion of his body is the slightest drop of his left shoulder, but Adrien convulses and chokes and Jewel cries out and hides her face in Cate’s shoulder.

And Cate stares, and stares, and stares into Lando’s eyes for the endless second or two before he drops his gaze and his face contorts in pain and anger as he yanks the knife-blade across and out of Adrien’s throat. Adrien’s body jerks, once, twice, and there’s a flood of blackly-crimson blood across the floor and Cate hadn’t believed how much blood Lando’s slender body could stand to lose, but she knows now the tide it takes to empty a man’s body.

“Oh dear Christ,” Liv says softly at Cate’s shoulder.

Lando drops the knife, and the surprise with which he looks at it fall makes Cate think it wasn’t on purpose. He sinks down onto his heels, head bending wearily.

Cate shrugs Liv’s hand off and steps forward. Lando is kneeling on the far side of Adrien’s body. Cate comes closer, her hem brushing in the blood pooling around the corpse. The silence in the room thickens. Cate sinks to her knees, staring down at her husband’s body.

She thinks, as she has once before, of a slaughtered animal. She reaches out with one hand, though her fingers hang in the air above Adrien’s throat and don’t actually connect. There’s no life beating thin and frail under the skin of his jaw … or, if there is, she chooses not to know. Lando looks up, his gaze sliding straight past her to the girls, an unspoken question in his eyes. Cate closes her eyes, dread washing down over her, before she forces herself to look at him again.

He’s nodding, though no one has spoken. And then, finally, he looks at Cate. Cate’s distantly aware of hot tears sliding silently down her face. It feels good, how the salt water cuts through the blood growing sticky on her cheeks.

“Tell us what to do,” Liv says, stepping forward so that she’s equidistant from Lando and Cate, and Cate understands that the request is addressed to them both.

All Cate can do is look at Lando. Something shifts in his eyes, something hard-edged and determined.

“Get a blanket, or a quilt, something ordinary, not something a customer here would recognize,” he rasps. “And something to tie it up with -- rope or heavy cord. I need someone to get his horse and take it around back -- ”

Jewel’s already gone, hurrying upstairs for the blanket, and Myra detaches from the group and heads for the passageway to the back of the house.

“I can manage that,” she says as she goes.

“ -- and, God damn, I need someone to help me up,” Lando winces.

There’s a long silence. Lando looks helplessly at Cate, but she’s staring down at the shambles on the floor. At last, Liv steps around the corpse and puts her hand under Lando’s elbow and hauls him up onto his feet. Lando coughs wetly and wipes his hand across his mouth. His palm comes away red.

Cate, still on her knees, lifts her head to him.

“Where do I take him?” she says.

"Nowhere," he says, both hoarse and sharp. What in God's name is she thinking, even asking that? She isn't even capable of what has to be done now, she isn't physically strong enough, and he would never ask it of her even if she were. She can't be thinking of burying her own husband.

He sees that she is, though, sees the sharp (fractured a little, harried with fear and pain, but familiar enough to loosen the tight knot in his belly very slightly) intent in her eyes and the grim set of her mouth, and he can't deny he's glad to see it, glad to see _Cate_ , and not that other woman who just stood there and let a man beat on her.

Lando staggers out from under Liv's arm and then has to lean heavily against the edge of a table to remain upright. There is another long, weighted silence. They are very still, Cate and Cate's girls, looking at him, facing the sudden understanding, the sudden reality of what he's done. He refuses to flinch away from their shock and white faces. His vision is swimming alarmingly, and he can't go down yet. He has things to do, and only a bare few hours of darkness in which to do them.

"Get me some whisky and a goddamned bandage," he says softly, gently. He looks at all of them, but not directly at any of them.

They don't move for a long moment. Liv is hovering at his side, her hands half out as though to catch him should he fall. Even Cate seems frozen, though she is staring at her dead husband, not at Lando.

He thinks maybe he will have to get his own whiskey and bandage, and the idea of trying to cross the room to the bar makes him think that maybe passing out right here on the floor is a better option.

Then Cate draws herself up, he sees it plainly, and looks away from the body. "Bandages and whiskey, Liv," she says. "Now."

Liv takes several steps backward, out of reach of Lando, before she turns her back to hurry toward the bar. Lando pretends he doesn't notice.

"We'll have to..." Cate begins.

"I'll have to," he interrupts sharply, instinctively shielding his eyes and his face, hiding the weariness and the pain that's grinding in his chest and the icy feel of his dead arm. "You'll stay here. You can't help with this," he tells Cate. "It's better if you don't know."

" _I_ should go," she objects fiercely, a hissing whisper that barely carries to Lando's ears, and probably doesn't make it to the girls still milling around in the corner near the walls, as though they can't figure out how to move away from the relative safety of the edges of the room now that the danger has passed. Or maybe they don't think the danger has passed at all. Sure enough, when he glances up more than one of them are throwing rabitty, sideways glances at him. "You can barely stand, dammit..."

"Don't," he says tiredly, not bothering to whisper himself, though he manages to insert at least a passable attempt at Julien into his voice. "Don't, I'm too tired to fight, and I've still got a lot to do. If you want to help me, get me a shirt and my boots and help me bind this arm back up."

He looks at her, and she can’t help flinching from that look. He’s a creature from a nightmare now, blood-smeared and dead-eyed. Cate supposes she looks the same.  
   
Lando shakes his head, shifting his attention to Liv who’s returning with her hands full of rolled bandages and an unopened bottle of the better whiskey under her arm. But she circles round and comes up beside Cate instead of directly to Lando. Cate takes the bottle from her and twists the cork out, then passes it to Lando. He glances at her by way of thanks, but it’s another grave-cold look between ghosts.

“Get Julien his boots, and a shirt,” Cate says to Liv, who leaves with grateful alacrity.

Jewel reappears with an anonymous gray blanket bundled in her arms and a hank of cord they use as a clothesline out back. She hurries in, then hangs back from actually coming close to the body.

Or maybe it’s Cate she’s wary of.

Or Lando.

Abruptly Cate’s nerves snap back into tension, anger seething in her stomach where there’s been only twisting fear and then hollow shock. She goes to Jewel, ignoring how the girl backs away a step before forcing herself to stay put.

“Give me that,” Cate says sharply, taking the blanket and cord.

She turns, forcing her gaze down to the butchered thing on the floor. She takes a step toward it.

“Get out,” she says evenly, and as clearly as she can around her swelling and stiffening facial muscles. “All of you. Go up to bed. Lock your doors and don’t come down here again until after noon.”

Some of them bolt, hardly waiting for her word to release them. Others hesitate, and have to be coaxed away.

“I’m _glad_ you did it,” Sabine says savagely, despite Jewel’s desperate attempt to shush her.

Lando’s eyes flicker towards Cate’s face, but she looks away before their gazes meet. Sabine lets Jewel lead her away. Cate tosses the cord on the table and shakes out the blanket, spreading it on the floor.

Liv comes back with Lando’s boots and one of his coarser shirts. Cate takes them from her.

“Lock up the front of the house and turn out the lamps,” Cate says. “Then go upstairs and stay there.”

“No,” Liv says sharply. “I’ll help.”

“You’ve blood on your hand,” Cate says, and her voice is cold and hard as steel. “Go and clean yourself up. And get the stain out of your dress or it’ll have to be burnt.”

Liv falters back, and doesn’t quite look to Lando, and then just turns and runs.

Cate goes to him, and goes down on her knees.

“Cate -- ”

“Put your foot in,” Cate says, holding his boot in place for him.

“I can -- ”

“Save what you can do for what you have to do,” she says, and he obeys.

When both boots are on she stands, and without ever meeting his eye she shakes out his shirt and as tenderly as she can she slides the sleeve up his right arm, and then holds the garment while he twists his left arm in too. She fastens up most of the buttons, her fingers brushing the smooth skin of his chest a little. He feels clammy to the touch, and too cold for such a sultry night.

Myra comes as far as the doorway.

“I got his horse tied up at the kitchen porch,” she says. “Say, where everybody’s gone?”

“Upstairs. I want you to go too,” Cate answers.

Myra bites her lip and looks like she’s thinking of arguing, but Cate gives her a look that subdues her and she backs out again.

“You need me, you just call, Miss Cate. You just call.”

“Hold on,” Cate says quietly to Lando. “This is going to hurt.”

She passes the first length of bandage around his chest, over his arm, and back around his side, and pulls

tight.

It takes several pulls from the bottle before Cate can finish with his arm. Twice he has to turn his head and spit blood, a thing that Cate says nothing about. It doesn't surprise him. What can she say?

He is exhausted and sick to his soul, but he isn't sorry. "What was his name?" he asks, because he feels it's important to have a name to go with his new ghost.

"Adrien," she whispers through white lips, and doesn't look up from where she's tying the ends of the bandage. "Adrien Brody."

Brody clearly had not been a man who would forgive or forget. If Lando had let him live, he would've come back to make Lando pay, and if Lando hadn't been here, he would've made Cate pay. And pay and pay and pay. He wouldn't have killed her; he would've made her life Hell, made the lives of every girl in the room Hell, because he was the sort of man who liked the power of that. He would have never stopped, never given up. He was probably also the kind of man who would've been comfortable hiring someone else to take care of his vengeance, and Lando would never have been able to sleep again without wondering if someone with a pocketful of Brody's (Cate's?) money was waiting for him to close his eyes.

Of course, Billy has already taken care of sound sleep for Lando anyway.

But this isn't about Billy. This is about _murder_ , and he can't pretend it had been anything else. Brody had been helpless; Lando had killed him anyway, enraged but deliberate.

He doesn't ask her anything else. It's none of his business, and he knows enough. He knows there is blood on Cate’s face, that her eye is swelling and purpling already, and that her hands are shaking but resolute.

She isn't sorry, either. Maybe sorry for the trauma, for the actual circumstances, but not sorry he's dead, and that's enough for him.

"You'll have to help me get the body up," he says softly, once his arm is bound and he's swallowed enough of the whiskey that the pain has receded to a dull, heavy throb in his arm. The pain in his chest is still vivid and present, and the metallic taste of blood in the back of his throat is thick and viscous.

She doesn't make a sound as they wrap and tie the body, and they get him up and slung over Lando's shoulder. He sways on his feet for a second when he pushes back upright, and her arm goes around his good arm just above the elbow, tight and harsh, but supportive.

"I..." she says, and he shakes his head.

"Don't let that sit any longer than you have to," he says sharply. "You'll never get it out of the boards."

She nods once. "I'll wait for you."

He doesn't bother to argue. "If I'm not back by dawn, don't expect me," he says. She looks at him, her eyes desperate and angry and terrified. "I can't walk through town in daylight looking like this. If I can't get back in time, I'll hole up somewhere. No matter what, Cate, don't come looking for me. No matter what."

She bites her lower lip and says nothing, but he looks at her, stares at her (and he knows how to bore into someone with his eyes, he knows how to coerce without words) until her shoulders slump and she finally nods with a tiny sound in her throat that might be a sob or a sigh.

He catches her hand and squeezes it for a moment, barely aware that their hands are both tacky with blood, and when he goes he doesn't look back.


	6. Discard: Lando, Yuma, 1876

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=never_heal.jpg)

 

He gets through most of it without thinking.

Breathing requires enough effort to take up most of his mind, breathing and staying on the back of a dead man's horse while also keeping said dead man on it. He'd dragged Brody up over his thighs (with Cate's help), and maybe the corpse is the only thing holding him in the saddle.

It hardly matters. He'll get through it because he has to.

The dunes are further than he wants to go in the dead black hours of the night, toting a dead man while his own blood burns the back of this throat --  hell, up the stairs at Cate's had been further than he wanted to go -- but the dunes are the place, the best possible place, to lose something. The Colorado is closer, but not as trustworthy at devouring things, consuming flesh and scattering bones.

He doesn't know if Brody had come to Yuma alone, but Lando has to assume that he didn't. He has to assume that someone will be looking for him, asking about him, and this inconvenient bundle of cooling flesh and bones must vanish, at least for a time. In the desert it will be desiccated in a matter of days. The flesh will be stripped from it, the bones will be scattered by animals. By the time it is found -- and it will be eventually, Lando knows, because that's just the way these things happen -- it must be unidentifiable.

He'll take anything that might identify Brody away with him. Things like guns are heavy enough to lose in the Colorado on his way back.

He sets his teeth, grim snarl of silent pain, and continues on.

There are rocks in the dunes, if they are needed. He tears Brody's shirt to rags and wedges them under a dozen different rocks. His trousers follow, and Lando cuts himself while he uses his knives to slice them to unidentifiable ribbons.

He stares at his bloody hand for a long time, musing and drifting. He hasn't cut himself with his own knives in better than a year.  The body (it is not a man, he tells himself, was never a man, did not marry Cate -- Ellie -- she had never loved him and he had never hurt her, because he was not a him, he was only an _it_ and had always been only an it, and it has to be this way for now because he doesn't have the strength to tell himself he'd done the right thing, had no choice, isn't going to hell, won't have to see fear and accusation in Cate's eyes along with relief she won't admit to, he can't do it, not now) and comes back to himself only when the wind rises and blows stinging sand into his eyes. He doesn't know how much time has passed. He's bitten through his lip and there is blood on his chin, dripping onto his shirt. He has to remember to have Cate burn his clothing.

He finishes what he is doing, his hand shaking and his eyes blurred, before finding a low place, but a place already gathering sand in the rising wind. He knows the dunes, he understands that the smallest object combined with the ever-present wind can erect a dune taller than Lando himself, and he needs to be sure that will happen here.

Lando stows the things taken from the body (gunbelt, guns, cigarette case, money, two small and crudely balanced knives, a pocket watch, and a pair of bone handled straight razors that disturb him because they are too similar to his own straight razors, ivory-handled, one of which is harmless atop Cate's dressing table, the other -- now feeling heavy with menace -- concealed inside a rigged pocket in his left boot) in a saddle bag.

It seems to take forever to do things with only one hand. He doesn't think he has un-set the bone in his right arm; once the pain had faded enough that he could touch it to examine it somewhat, it had seemed to still be straight and aligned. It's useless to him right now, though, and his trained left hand seems to become stupider as the night wears on. In spite of the months upon months of learning to use the damned thing (it seems unfair that he should be so quick and good with both hands, that he should find everything so easy, knitting, cards, knives, but his left hand remains stupid when he's denied the use of his right), he doesn't use it as much as he uses his right. 

And he is hurt and tired. And maybe it's not his hand that's getting stupider, but merely Lando himself. His brain feels thick and foggy, swathed in cotton.

He finds himself on the banks of the Colorado without really remembering the journey in between. He hurls the remains of the 'it' as far out into the river as he can manage, and thinks it will be far enough. He keeps the money. For Cate. Technically, it belongs to her now.

He releases Brody's horse miles outside of town with a burr under its saddle, confident it will run for miles and miles before it dislodges it (he has set it so that it can be dislodged, and he thinks woozily that Bills would berate him for it, while silently amused at his tenderheartedness) and the next thing he knows, he is on his knees on the ground with his forehead pressed to dry earth while hoarse and painful sobs tear their way out of his chest like clawed animals. There is blood all down the front of his shirt now, black in the waning starlight, and he is badly hurt somewhere inside, and not only in that place that is tearing blood from his guts.

He spends a long time alternately sobbing and coughing before he is able to pull himself to his feet. He kicks loose, sandy soil over the dark stain on the ground.

He staggers back into town in a state that is beyond thought, barely aware, knowing only that the only safe place is Cate's house, and he must get there before people start stirring.

Once in town he stays against the sides of buildings, and he knows he'll be seen if there is anyone out. He knows it because he can't think enough for subterfuge, and even if he could, he can't move enough for it, so he has to trust blindly in luck.

At Cate's, he staggers in the back door and into the main room through the kitchen. She's waiting for him, pale and drawn and tired; when she sees him she lets out a little moan of distress.

"Cate," he says, and his voice is a broken gurgle. He tries to smile at her, and thinks his lips must look ghastly, bloody and twisted. He hears gasps from the landing (they must have been waiting upstairs for him to come in and Cate will surely scold them with her sharp tongue, but it's somehow soothing, reassuring, that they had been worried about him in spite of what they had seen, had stayed up to be sure he made it back all right, and for the first time he allows himself to hope that what he had seen in their faces earlier had been _real_ ), and one of the girl's voices, high and shrill, says, "Oh, sweet Christ, have mercy," and Lando falls, time warped and twisted so that it flows like raw molasses, so that he registers the fear and horror on Cate's face and the fear in his own mind ( _Billy didn't kill me, but I've fixed that now, he'll be happy_ ) before he hits the floor (he thinks he will scream, maybe he even does) and the world goes white to grey to black.


	7. Everything and Nothing: Cate, Lando, Yuma, 1876

They can’t send for help; even Samuel will have too many questions about how his nicely recovering patient ended up a broken, bloodied mess again. Women’s hands must do everything that’s to be done.

There are no burly and almost sober customers to carry Julien upstairs this time. The women spread a bed-sheet out on the parlor floor and shift him, inch by careful inch, onto it. Then half a dozen of them, three on each side, gather up the sheet’s edges until they have him suspended in its shroud-like folds. Slowly, with exquisite care, they bear him up the two flights of stairs to Cate’s rooms.

 _Adrien’s body rolled in a blanket that had been discarded when Margot bought herself a patch quilt at the store, and tied with the cord used as an extra clothesline when busy nights made for extra laundry._

They set him down on Cate’s bed and part the folds of bloodstained linen to reveal his closed eyes and white face. The women kindle lamps and pour water, moving with silent grace. Cate’s house offers baths and a little barbering too; sharp steel scissors gleam in the lamplight. They cut his blood-soaked clothes off him, murmuring over every fresh bruise. Cate’s clothes – gown and petticoats, right down to her shift and drawers – are blood stained too. The garments are ripped into pieces and fed in small bundles to the range in the kitchen and the pot-bellied stove in the back parlor, until the stench of burning cotton and charring blood fills the whole house.

They wash him, wiping the blood and dirt from his skin tenderly. They lay him out, straightening his slender limbs and brushing the tangle of his dark curls back from his face. Cate returns, in a clean shift with her hair hanging loose around her shoulders. For a second she stops on the threshold, her hand pressed to her mouth to hold in her sob when she sees him prone and naked, women stooping and swaying over him, their hands unhurried on his unmoving limbs. He looks like a corpse being readied for burial.

 _The clothes stripped from Adrien’s body torn to pieces, wedged between rocks or pushed into the sand. The grit-rough grains wind-blown into crevices, around the curve of a shoulder, the blind hollow behind a man’s knee._

It’s Cate who feels her way down Julien’s arm and judges the bone to be still straight and sound. It’s Cate who rebinds his ribs, pulling the strips of torn sheeting tight enough to drive his breath out from between his teeth in a thin whine.

They spread a fresh sheet over him, and without instruction they wipe every trace of blood from the scissor blades, and rinse the bowls, and burn every bit of rag and towel soiled rust-red. They turn the lamps down low, and one by one they go down to bed, parting from each other with gentle kisses and embraces.

Liv and Myra are the last ones left, except for Cate, who’s taken up her place again in the chair next to the bed. Julien, who’s been asleep or fainted since he folded on the floor of the front parlor, coughs thickly. There’s a dark rush of blood from his mouth, staining the sheet covering him. Liv and Myra start forward, but Cate leans in, towel already in hand, and staunches the flow. She doesn’t so much as glance at the two girls.

Liv takes Myra’s arm and draws her away, shaking her head when Myra opens her mouth to protest.

 _A coyote’s paws scrabbling in the dirt, its jaws worrying at the already drying claw of a man’s out-stretched hand._

Lando doesn't struggle this time. He doesn't thrash in his sleep; he doesn't fight against the pain or the dreams. He lies quietly, his body burning steadily. When he coughs, the spasms barely lift his ribs. Cate cheats a little water between his lips and sits with his hand folded in hers, her jaw clenched tightly.

“I told you to go,” she says narrowly. “Why didn’t you just go?”

She leans in, her fingers curving around the flushed skin of his cheekbone.

“Damn it, Lando. I gave you your life back. Why didn’t you take it? Why didn’t you go?”

Lando makes a soft choking noise, and there’s a bright bubble of red at the corner of his mouth. Cate lifts him against her shoulder, tipping him forward until he coughs and the breath drags unsteadily into his lungs again. Cate eases him down onto the pillow, not even aware of how her shift is sticking hotly to her skin, soaked with his blood.

“Don’t you dare die,” she whispers fiercely. “Don’t you dare throw that back in my face, after I worked so hard to keep you alive.”

Lando arches weakly, his eyelids flicking as his mouth strains open, gasping for air he can’t get to anymore.

“Lando!” Cate snaps, both hands on his shoulders. “If you die, I swear, I’ll curse you to hell for not listening to me. Don’t – don’t you leave me!”

She hauls and shoves at him, rolling him onto his side despite the choking gasp of pain the motion tears from him. His face turns against the pillow and he heaves powerfully. There’s a red black rush onto the pillow and sheets, and Cate has to press her hand over her mouth and nose to stifle the smell of rot and rawness. Lando’s breath comes thin and shallow and quick, but it comes.

Cate drops to her knees on the floor next to where he’s hanging close to the side of the bed. She palms his hair back, heedless of the streaks of red she’s leaving on his forehead.

“Come back to me, God damn you. Come back so I can tell you how angry I am at you.”

Dark turns to dawn, day to evening, dusk to dark again. The girls hover, hoping to coax Cate away for food and rest, but she’s hardly aware of their presence. She cleans him all over again, and herself too. By the second night, the sheets stay pristine because Lando no longer has the strength to cough or retch. Cate sits curled in her chair, her fingers tucked under the limp weight of his left hand, her face pale and pinched.

“Lando,” she whispers, her voice thick with a threatening sob. “Come back. I need you to come back. I can’t do this without you.”

She slides out of her seat and sits on the edge of the bed with his hand cradled in hers in her lap.

“I’m afraid.”

The tears finally overbalance on her eyelashes and spill in hot salt tracks down her cheeks.

"I'm afraid, and you're the only thing that's ever made me feel safe, Lando."

Another night melts into another pale dawn. Cate aches all over, and shivers with the sickly chill of exhaustion. Lando is still and white, only the faint stirring of warmth between his parted lips betraying the life still lingering in him.

Cate has been lying next to him, but she gets up and bends over him until she can feel his breath on her face. A strangely indulgent smile curves her lips.

"Lando. I want you come back … because I love you."

She leans down a little more, putting her mouth against his, and exhaling softly. Her eyelids flutter almost closed, and she remains like that, her lungs empty and stilled, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing does. Cate's chest begins to burn for want of air. She straightens, pressing her hand to her mouth to stifle her sobbing inhalation. She turns away, wiping her hair from her face and crossing to her dresser. Liv laced her into a gray housedress a day or so ago, but her hair's been hanging down her back ever since she discarded the flowered pins she'd been wearing when she went downstairs to Adrien.

Cate gathers her hair and twists it up, sticking pins haphazardly into her curls.

 _So help me God, I'll never say it again – nor feel it again – for any man drawing breath_ , Cate swears to herself. _If I live through this grief, I'll never live through it again._

She swipes tears off her cheeks with her hands, and lifts her chin to consider her reflection with hard-eyed determination.

 _Please, God. Let me live through this, and I will never feel, or care, or hurt for any man again._

There are towels and sheets piled on top of the bureau, and Cate bundles them efficiently and ties the outer most layer together. She turns, her glance skipping over the foot of the bed to the pillows, looking for –

\- Lando's eyes are open, hugely dilated and ringed with shadows, but rational.

Cate presses her hand to her stomach.

"Lando?" she says shakily.

He blinks slowly, all the affirmation he's capable of. Cate starts forward a step, then stops abruptly.

 _Let me live through this._

Was that what she'd prayed? 'Me'? or had she, in her heart, meant Lando?

She gathers herself, and moves quietly and calmly to his side.

Lando's trying to speak, his lips peeling apart dryly and his fingers flexing weakly on the covers.

"No," Cate says evenly. "Stay quiet. Everything's all right. We're all right; no one's been looking for him, or for you."

She eases him up on the pillow slightly and reaches for the glass on the table next to the bed.

"We cleaned everything up, and the girls don't even say it to each other, much less anyone else. It's like it never happened, Lando. It's just like it never happened."


End file.
